Companies that engage in commercial transactions often communicate to each other using various forms to negotiate terms of their transactions. For example, purchasers who wish to purchase an item may send a purchase order to a supplier. The purchase order may set forth the number of items that are requested, the price, and a requested delivery date. The supplier may respond with a confirmation or with an alternate proposal setting forth items that can be delivered, a price and dates that the supplier is able to deliver these items.
These exchanges may be using paper forms that are sent via facsimile (FAX). Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) may also be used to communicate business transactions, such as orders, confirmations and invoices, between organizations electronically. Extensible Markup Language (XML) has been a primary vehicle used to connect businesses together using the World Wide Web (WWW) as the communications vehicle. XML is used for defining data elements on a Web page and business-to-business documents.
However, current methods of transmitting these forms are prone to many problems that may incur unnecessary costs and cause poor performance in the delivery of the desired items. Suppliers who receive purchase order forms may not be connected to a purchaser's system and may not want to work on-line. Thus, forms may be manually completed requiring that information received in these forms be manually entered into a database. This is a lengthy process that is prone to errors. Additionally, suppliers may include errors in their responses to purchase orders or else suppliers may fail to adequately respond leading to further delays and inaccuracies. Further, printouts of electronic data may not be in a user-friendly format that is similar to a paper purchase order. Manual intervention may be required to obtain a usable printout. The problems with current systems become more severe for purchasers and suppliers who send and receive many such forms to conduct their business. Purchasers and suppliers would benefit from leveraging communication tools such as electronic mail (e-mail) to send forms to users who want to work off-line without losing benefits of working on-line such as filtering data that is input into the form and having access to data by on-line systems.